Friday, February 19, 2010

Doomed

Would be robber flees whenclerk insists he must callwife before giving money.

I never believed a revolution of any kind would be possible in America. I am beginning to think otherwise. The Fascists have now become so brazen in their takeover of our democracy I’m not sure what other recourse is open to us. Now the Department of Justice has made it clear that the lawyers, Yoo, Busby, and another one whose name escapes me for the moment, the very lawyers that made a mockery of law when they authorized torture and murder, are guilty of nothing but “bad judgment,” and hence will not be held otherwise accountable for their scurrilous behavior and outrageously awful practice of the law. This was not bad judgment that mistakenly awarded Murphy’s cow to the neighbors, but, rather, bad judgment that resulted in the deaths of many people, mostly innocents. If these criminal lawyers cannot be held accountable for their despicable practice of the law, there is no chance whatsoever that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice et al will ever be held accountable for their (even admitted) war crimes. This presumably final opinion was released today, Friday, February 19, 2010, because bad news is typically released on Friday and besides, the Tiger Woods apology took over the news, thus rendering this terrible opinion even less newsworthy. And make no mistake about it, this is a terrible development that even makes a complete mockery of the Nuremberg trials and international law. The fact that the Department of Justice could announce this means they have abandoned the rule of law and this administration believes they can do whatever they wish, however unconstitutional or illegal.

When you consider this development along with the recent Supreme Court ruling that corporations can make unlimited financial donations to political causes, thus awarding them control over elections and policies, you can only conclude the Fascists are now so confident in their control of our country they no longer even have to pretend otherwise. If these outrageous decisions are allowed to go unchallenged and unchanged we are surely doomed to live under a Fascist government (a marriage between politics and corporations, just as Mussolini prescribed). I never believed I would see anything like this in the U.S., but as near as I can tell, it is happening right now and not even in secret.

You can see this being played out in the great Health Care charade. A number of Senators have now signed on to promote the public option, a plan that was already left for dead. There is talk of doing this through reconciliation, a process that would avoid a filibuster and could be passed just by a majority of Democrats. But notice this is just talk, with no one willing to take responsibility for actually bringing it about. Congress says they will support it if the White House does, and the White House says it will support it if the Congress does, and the (currently) 19 Senators who have signed on to support it I’m pretty certain know that it is not going to really happen (19 is a far cry from the 51 votes necessary). As the Insurance and Pharmaceutical corporations do not want a public option it is not at all likely to materialize. As a public option is overwhelmingly favored by the public, and has been all along, and if it now fails again to happen, we will know once more just who is in charge of our lives.

Somewhere today I overheard Eric Cantor say the Republicans will say “no” to the public option. That is hardly surprising, but what I did find of interest is his claim they will do so “because the American public has said “no.” Either I am terribly misinformed of what the public has been saying all along about favoring a public option, or Eric Cantor is a bald-faced liar (which I also do not find surprising). I do not believe a public option will come to pass because Democrats are far too timid to insist upon it. There are 19 Senators who claim to support it, and there are said to be a number of others who support it but have not yet publicly said so, but it is also being said Democrats are “afraid of it” because of the possible fall-out if they unilaterally pass it. They cling to the idea that it has to be bipartisan, and as long as they believe that, it will never come to be. In any case you might notice that even if a public option would somehow come to pass it would not eliminate Insurance companies from involvement in health care, the elimination of which should be the bottom line for any decent health care plan. There is no need for insurance companies to be involved in health care at all, just as there is no need for banks to be involved in student loans, but it’s the American way (of idiocy).